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Tuesday, September 1, 2015

A brief history of... Burgal's Bounty

By now many people will have realized that the logo for Phat Games and the icon for the Burgal's Bounty have changed. Well, this is the 4th time Burgal's Bounty has been "re-imaged." Every time the game was redesigned in the past it was because it was getting re-platformed. This time, there is a combination of reasons for the redesign (including a re-platforming). But first, here is a complete timeline of Burgal's Bounty!

2001: Burgal's Bounty is released for the DOS platform (under the name Phat Professional Burglar), built entirely in QBasic. While PC's at the time could do much, much, much better than the low resolution graphics of the game, the game was built entirely in QBasic and faced a limitation of 320 x 200 for it's graphics.

2011: 10 years later, as a hobby project, Phat Professional Burglar is released on the Windows Phone 7. The game saw a number of downloads in that market space but never made any money. The graphics were redesigned for the higher resolution phones. Very little else changed. It should be noted that this is actually when the Android version of the game started development.

2015: The Android version took 4 years to be completed. Not because it took that long to code, but because Phat Games was unable to dedicate time to it. It was being treated like a hobby project for a large portion of that time leading up to the end. When the game was nearing completion, it was sent around with focus groups to get feedback. The one thing that was expressed was that the game needed new graphics. The HD facelift of the Windows Phone graphics were not going to cut it with today's standards. As a result, the game was entirely redesigned again and was put into a 3 month pre-launch on the Android.

Present: With the Android pre-launch period complete, and based on user feed back for the game, Phat Games is giving the game a final polish before the iOS launch (with a formal parallel Android launch). Also, with this revamp we are announcing a Steam launch!

That's right, we are targeting to formally have the iOS and Android relaunch available by December with the Steam release following shortly after. Also, stay tuned for our announcement this fall for Phat Games' next game!